Together alone

Business partners. Can’t live with them, can’t live… well, with them, it seems.

Over the years, I’ve advised dozens of business partnerships. I’ve also had three partnerships of my own, including two spectacular failures. They have all demonstrated how challenging this type of relationship can be.

By the end of this email, I hope you’ll have some food for thought about how to navigate your own partnership, if you’re in one.

Even if you’re not, what follows is relevant to any of your senior relationships.

“I despair of him.”

I was in a session with one half of a well-established business partnership. As is often the case, by the time I got involved the relationship had been breaking down for a while.

“Everything was fine until the numbers started going backwards,” said my client. “It took us by surprise.”

The clue was that word: surprise. There is no such thing as ‘all of a sudden’ in business.

“Let’s go back to the time before the disappointing numbers,” I suggested. “Talk to me about that.”

What he had to say illuminated common problems in business partnerships of every kind.

In the beginning

Years earlier, my clients had gone into business together, as friends. For a while, everything had looked rosy.

This wasn’t a surprise. All business partnerships get going on a simple premise. “Together, we can achieve something remarkable; something that we couldn’t do alone.”

The payload of this premise is an intoxicating injection of optimism. This is a good thing — a vital one, in fact — from the perspective of vision, conviction and momentum creation.

But, like many injections, it has side-effects. Chief amongst them is optimism bias. This can blind us to the often brutal reality of running a business. Again, this bias has its benefits. ‘The stats suggest we’re going to fail’ isn’t a feel-good foundation for entrepreneurship.

Optimism bias inclines partners to imagine that happily ever after applies to their relationship, too. I once spoke with a lawyer who had built his practice litigating partnership breakdowns. “The thing is”, he said, “no-one ever gets married planning for the divorce”.

Reality comes knocking

While my clients were busy making other plans, reality had intruded, fists flying.

In business, reality hits us all in ways both large and small. Financial underperformance. Product flops. Cashflow crises. Employee grievances. Bad debt. Worse hires. Lost sales opportunities. To lead any sort of organisation is to a face a kaleidoscope of problems on a daily basis.

As time goes by, these difficulties aren’t confined to the office. Families endure unforeseen issues. Parents get ill and need attention. Wants, needs and aspirations change — and, with them, professional and financial goals.

Such pressures will test any partnership. This is because a partnership comprises human beings. And human beings always have differing perspectives, needs and ideas. Pressure can make it difficult to find the space, time and courage that’s needed to reconcile them.

Sometimes partners pull together in adversity, and get stronger as a result. But, more often, something more subtle occurs. On the surface, the partnership does what it needs to do to ensure survival. But take a closer look and you will see that hairline cracks have begun to appear.

Things left unsaid

For my client, it had started with a single event. He had taken a meeting on his own because his partner had prioritised taking his dog to the vet. The meeting hadn’t gone well. But the pair had never discussed their respective contributions to this outcome.

That was the hairline crack.

They’re far from the only colleagues to experience this sort of tension. Pink Floyd once recorded a track called Things Left Unsaid. It’s a perfect title to sum up a group who worked together for decades without ever managing to get on good terms. These days, they’re engaged in open warfare.

‘Things left unsaid’ describes most business partnerships. At one level, it’s sound relationship management. We could spend our lives pointing out every tiny thing that bothers us about the behaviour of others. But we’d find it impossible to rub along with them. Give and take is the secret to any human relationship.

But it is all too easy for partners to start feeling that the give and take equation is out of balance. One partner gets distracted with a personal issue, leaving the other to pick up the slack. Or lands more new business than the other. Or has a habit of mishandling a certain kind of situation. The list goes on.

What starts as a hairline crack in the partnership can rupture into a chasm of resentment. This remains unacknowledged — right up to the moment that it swallows everything.

What lies beneath

Back to the session. It seemed to me that the partnership had been experiencing three common problems:

• In the early days, optimism had blinded the partners to the fact that things would be difficult at times
• Tough but necessary upfront conversations about how to address challenges had not occurred
• For fear of causing upset, the partners had stopped communicating about their relationship

What had looked like strong foundations for a partnership had been nothing of the sort. Years later, my clients were left surveying a business whose entire structure felt unsound.

I offered a gentle challenge. “Listening to this, does it feel possible that these issues led to the numbers going backwards? Rather than the numbers going backwards leading to the issues?”

“Oh God, that’s right,” he said. A pause.

“How do we fix it?”

The partnership is the work

The secret to successful business partnerships lies in a simple truth.

A business partnership is not only an enabler of the work, it is the work.

All business partners need to pay attention to the health of the partnership itself. This is because the partnership is a mission-critical asset in the business.

When thinking along these lines, it can be helpful to see the partnership as separate from the individuals involved. Instead, imagine it as a living entity that you choose to nurture or leave to wither and die.

Here are three questions that it can be helpful to explore as business partners:

• How are we each feeling about the business and the partnership as our lives evolve?
• Where are we bringing out the best in one another in our day-to-day work?
• What does it feel difficult for us to discuss, and why?

This isn’t easy work. It involves stepping into the zone of uncomfortable conversations, which can take practice.

But, as so often in human relationships, it’s a case of ‘pay now or pay later’. And the problem with paying later is that compound interest often makes the bill so much bigger.

Meanwhile, next time I’ll be talking about what happens in the aftermath of difficult decisions. And why ‘the morning after’ can often pose a far bigger risk to organisational health than leaders think.

Thanks for reading.

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